So... Amnesiac

My first impressions I remember quite clearly were that it was a good modern pop album.

I haven't heard it yet, but what a fantastic description! It almost makes me want to buy it.

But til I actually hear anything off it, I will keep my distance. I can't help but regard them w/a little suspicion.

Personally (while I've only heard it via Napster), it sounds to me just like A Radiohead Album. Not an album where they're trying to find their footing (Pablo Honey, The Bends), not an album where they're trying to "push the envelope" (OK Computer, Kid A). Just a regular ol', relaxed, big- fuckin'-deal Radiohead album. The closest they've come to A Radiohead Album since The Bends (which I like, despite their tendency to hit the U2 Bombast pedal too often), except that the "weirdness" that typifies their later work comes more naturally in this context. (See "Pyramid Song" for the most obvious example.)

If you're expecting profundity or Big Statements or something to change the world...well, don't hold your breath. If you want (as Tom puts it, and I'm paraphrase) a good album with good songs, buy Amnesiac. It's as simple as that.

if you don't agree you are wrong.

My take: The first few listens of "Pyramid Song" failed to make an impression, then suddenly it clicked and became one of the most gorgeous songs in the world. Expand that to the album, where the only song I immediately embraced was "Pull/Pulk Revolving Doors" and you've got it; initially off-putting music that suddenly becomes intensely intimate and wonderful the instant you turn your back.

Back to tunes. That’s what you said. OK Computer 2. At least we thought that’s what you said. That’s how it read. That’s how it came across. But you lied. You betrayed us.

No tunes. No guitars. Nothing you can whistle and strum on your tennis racket to. You’re here because of us. I was 16 when OK Computer came out. How could you do this to us? Not give us what we expect? What we demand? As fans?

It’s crap. No tunes. Moaning about nine revolutions. And warm guns in the road. You should’ve held on to Pete Best. I was 14 when A Hard Day’s Night came out.

Pseudo-avant garde. Pretend kindergarten minimalism/maximal noise blockade. How can anyone familiar with Cardew’s Great Learning fall for this conservative manifesto donning the colours of radicalism? Compared with the meisterwerks of Mille Plateaux – with which you should be thoroughly familiar, otherwise we will cancel your subscription as you are unworthy – it grasps but cannot grip. Ornette in ’72. Miles also ahead. Thomas Koner’s big freeze. This is as nothing in comparison. I was 19 when Dancing In Your Head came out.

I’m a hypocrite. I bang on about Abbey Road and Blonde on Blonde pushing the envelope. Someone’s doing it now. But I can’t stand it. Sid didn’t die for Yorke. So I’m going to slate it. Lose 70% of the readership. But I can’t help it. It was all over after ’68. That’s what the demographics say. Me and my army. Get your knives out if you want. I was 15 when Revolver came out. Minus Zero have some great Pearls Before Swine ESP CDs in stock (Italian 1995 gatefold reissue).

I’m 22. It confuses me. I can’t have a barbecue with this in the background. Humphrey Lyttelton? Whom are they kidding? We want to listen to things which are real and cosy and comforting. Travis. Muse. Coldplay. They’ve seized the baton. And the tunes. Not to mention the guitars. That’s what it’s all about. I was 12 when Nevermind came out.

This is completely boring self-pitying crap. You can do better than this. Where are all the jokes? The pisstakes? Jools Holland? Now that was funny. Now you’re just whingeing. Middle-class overgrown student angst. Who gives a fuck what you think about it? Remember what you’re good at. I was 31 when Writing On The Wall came out.

I’m not what you think. Much of the time I’m scared. Much of the time I feel as though I am living for nothing. How can you live without certainty and yet not be paralysed by fear? But at least I’m honest. And it moves me. More than Missy. Easier than Elbow. Doubt is there, there’s no doubt. It exists and it has to be listened to. Don’t forget. I was happy when it came out.

I have had this album a day now and fuck it - I like it. After reading Marcello's post - who gives a shit what journos, students, punks, prog-rockers, sixties revivalists, nu-metallers, Britpop nostalgists, Warpheads and Indiekids think? This album may not be the best album ever made, nor the best album Radiohead ever made, but it is still a good album - and as mentioned earlier, it sounds, for once, like Radiohead being Radiohead - as they want to be.

Sorry for the amount of hyphens and length of that last sentence - i've just been down the pub and linguistic syntax isn't my stronogest point right now.

Marcello is my new personal hero though, and that is an objective fact.

Read some more disappointed-fannish-type reviews tonight, very sadly humorous and also perfectly illustrative of what I'm guessing lots of fans' reactions to the album have been / will be like. Mumblings about another-rubbish-electronic-"song", etc.

I do have to say, I'm glad it wasn't a "oh well, we'll give the fans what they really want" concession after all. Kind of makes me have a bit more respect for them after all. If you want to make unlistenable noise, by all means make unlistenable noise if that's what you want to do! Anyway...

However, I sequenced the two as a double yesterday, mixing and matching tracks from both records, and it works brilliantly. Going in prepared for the 90-minute long haul, rather than a 40-minute quick fix, makes me much more able to treat each track as 'just another Radiohead track' rather than tablets of stone and actually improves every track for me.

This may be why my first complaint is that the album has no damned flow. It seems to be a bunch of disconnected outtakes stuck together. Which is, I guess, exactly what it is.

So far, the only song that has really grabbed me is "I Might Be Wrong" which is really odd cause it's the alt.country song and you know how I feel about alt.country being one of the evils of the universe. I *like* the few bleepy bits, I think they make the album hang together more, and be more sonically interesting. Otherwise, it just seems like a bunch of maudlin ballads strung together. Pyramid Song is almost unlistenable except for that bit at the end where the strings come in.

OK, I probably should give this more of a chance on a different format, but you know what? The new Appliance album just dropped on *our* doormat this morning, and I'd much rather listen to that. The apparent single, "Gentle Cycle Revolution" sounds a bit like Spiritualized. Ooooh, nice. And bits of New Order and stuff in there, makes me a much happier girl than Tom Yorke whinging.

Of course, you may just not like us.

The thing about web publishing is that you know pretty much exactly who's going to read a piece, unless that piece suddenly gets wider distribution.

I forgot to mention that "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" is one of the best hip-hop tracks to come out this year.

But then I got my hands on _Rooty_ and all thoughts or cares about Radiohead promptly disappeared from my head. Yay for the Jaxx.

Other thing: I could swear that a few months ago, Radiohead were Tom E's betes noirs - he hated them about as much as he loves Britney Spears. And now he likes them - doesn't he? What's going on? This seems like a total volte-face - has it ever been remarked upon?

i mean that i suddenly forgot radiohead were shit. pyramid song did the same for me. maybe i'll buy the tape and put it up next to my cassette of the bends.

As for the songs themselves, there's a quite a bit of nice work on display. I never really distinguished between the use of the guitars and non-guitars, so I tend to judge on the basis of the sound of the music, which at times is really full and enveloping ("Pakt Like Sardines..." and "Morning Bell/Amnesiac" particularly) while at others is a bit thin and reedy - which doesn't hinder the perception of this as a bit of an outtakes album. Whatever, dunno what I'll eventually think of the whole thing a week or so.

I do find it interesting how the criticisms of the album often seem to use opposing arguments - on one hand saying "you promised us a rock song album and we *need* another one" while on the other saying "we don't *need* more stuff with a Warp/Mille Plateux bent"... As if there's an endless glut of IDM-rock in the world and a sorrowful dearth of guitar rock.

Certainly I reckon that the current place Radiohead are at is more singular and almost "necessary" (as in if they weren't working in this area than someone else would have to) than either their Bends or OK Computer incarnations, despite the ease with which we can point to their current influences. I can to that to any artist, and if it was all that was necessary to discredit them then Tanya's job would be too easy. If nothing else, Radiohead get my vote because there's a certain fan I know who's smug anticipation of a Travis-like return will have been replaced by a look of decidedly un-smug consternation.

1) It still doesn't flow, it still doesn't have that sense of continuity. OK Computer had flow, that was part of what made it a great album for me. What this album sounds like, in fact what it probably *is* is a B-sides compilation. Any other band, when they record too many songs for a single album, usually throw the less strong but still releaseable material onto B-sides of singles. (IIRC, many of the OK Computer B-sides made it onto the startlingly brilliant "Airbag EP" in the States.) Radiohead didn't do singles for Kid A, yet they still wanted to release the extra material, hence Amnesiac.

2) Have spent a lot of time in the past few months thinking that Kid A was a less than stellar, rather average and ordinary album. This weekend, while waiting for soundcheck, the engineer was testing the sound system by playing some records. She put on something which slowly grabbed me, and had me thinking "wow, this is a really interesting record, I wonder what it is, some neat stuff going on here..." for a few songs before realising that it was Kid A. Heard out of the expected context of "we're going to listen to the Radiohead album now", and heard through a really good professional sound system, it suddenly seemed magical

3) I still think the new Appliance album is fantastic. Funny, because everyone has been telling me that it's not as good as the old one. Dug the old one out, and it was fairly average post-rock with bits of electronic bits added on almost as afterthought. The new album is much more cohesively mixed, guitar-and-electonics-based dronerock/post-rock rather than a band adopting an "IDM" (whee, I learn a new phrase every week on ILM) sound as an added gimmick. So there.

It flows better on CD, that is for certain. (I blame 10" vinyl for my initial complaints.) I think it is some of Thom's best vocal work for ages... I don't care if I can't make out the lyrics, as I said in that there other thread, it's the *tone* and expressiveness of his voice that intrigues me. Kid A's vocals were buried, treated and half hearted. These are fully out there, even if it does sometimes come across as whinging.

And oh, the textures. I've even grown to like Pyramid Song for the way those strings appear. I can't even tell you which song is which, or which is my favourite, because the album has become one long song. My only complaint is still the cod jazz at the end, that has *not* grown on me.

This is better than Kid A. Their B-sides are usually better than the singles anyway... "Meeting In The Aisle", "Palo Alto", "How Can You Be Sure", etc.

Contrary to Kate, the songs seem really distinct to me. Perhaps the middle 3 get a little blended together, but for the most part I had them sorted apart in my head pretty well right off.

Dear Radiohead fans: time's up, please bring your copies of Amnesiac back to the library today or face a fine.

http://sleevage.com/radiohead-amnesiac/

(If only they'd been able to see into the future to realise that National Library Day was at the weekend, not today.)

Oh I have that one!

It's alright, no-one put down that they wanted it next.

It's similar to the one for "Piper at the gates of Dawn" which had a copy of "Fart Enjoy" by Syd enclosed.

I have a completely different one! It says 30th May on it but I think that's the radio embargo date. Oddly I was just listening to this yesterday. It's the one I listen to the least, for deeply personal reasons. It's always better than I remember it bcuz of that.

The only one I 'love' is KidA.

The rest, I 'like' or even (sigh) Respect...

But K, I hear that opening arpegio and go "yes....!"

(K being short for "KidA" obviously, that reads somewhat unclear there)

Some albums become so entangled with the memories of yr life that listening to them again is like opening a snapshot of a scenario from yr own life. It's strange, I never think of RH as one of my "favourite" bands at all, but it's that way that specific albums became so entwined with certain periods of my life (bcuz that album was maybe the go-to comfort food while in that trauma or transitional period) that they've become entwined with the tentacles of mine own memory. It's not a question of love or even like, as, this thing has become a part of me.

Wish I'd picked a better band to be that collective subconscious thing, but oh well.

Well, is it like how the 'Beatles' were ever-present during the 60s?

For all that there were loads of bands and 'listeners' that did not like them, everything was based on the deviation from that 'normality'..

Massive generalisation, of course, but.

Funny, I just saw the entry for "Treefingers" on Wiki:

The ambient track "Treefingers" contains no melody and is completely instrumental. Ed O'Brien pointed out in an interview that no synthesizers were used to make the song, and that it was all recorded on a guitar, after which it was cut and paste onto a sampler.

.. which was pretty much how I recorded the track I supplied for the ILX one-minute compilation, which was recorded about 10 years before KidA.

Listening to this for the first time in probably a decade. What a killer album! Still far and away my favorite by them. "Knives Out" is the best kind of cloudy dour British anti-surf rock. Really looking forward to the last two tracks.

My least favourite between Ok Computer and In Rainbows, though I haven't given it as much attention as some of the others. Pyramid Song is incredible obviously, as is Dollars and Cents.

I love Kid A and all their guitar albums (minus Pablo Honey), so why did it take me over a decade to like this?.. Why am I such a jerk?

I forgot all about this album.

I see what you did there.